Henne's List

By Mac Nicolson

Inspector Delmar Hubert of Brussels Homicide is well accustomed to unusual cases. In fact his speciality is delving into the dark arts, the occult and the twilight zones of hard to explain phenomena when solving crimes but this case, where people appear to be literally walking out from the long ago past to rid the world of corporate executives a

• Language: English
• Publisher: Alan Macdonald Nicolson
• Release date: Mar 1, 2022
• ISBN: 9789895328604

Mac Nicolson

Mac Nicolson was born and raised on a farm in the middle of Tasmania, was gratefully expelled from boarding school at fourteen and after a series of childhood mystical experiences and with the impending possibility of having to go into the army and kill people for whom he harbored no ill will, left for India when only nineteen. He passed the next five years travelling the long since separated lands of ancient Gondwana - India and South America - searching for answers to the mysteries of existence before returning to Australia to start a community. Mac's time in Australia included a stint as a City Councilor and political activist, a columnist for a local news journal, a snake catcher, a horse breeder and tamer and a forest regenerator but after fifteen years or more and after raising a few children he began to venture back to India and Brazil, until settling in Brazil with his then Brazilian wife. Mac never planned to be a novelist and claims no great ability - he simply had a desire to share the stories that flowed out from a past that had both inspired and haunted him, each of which had first appeared to him in dreams and visions to be then confirmed by chance meetings with shamans, witches, and random fellow travelers. In all of his writings, the author strives to adhere to historical authenticity and many of the characters in his books are based on real people and events, as in The King of The Lochlains and The Sun Dancer, and in the case of his first book, The Asva Sani of Khasi, based on the story of that great Indian epic, The Mahabharata. His fourth book, The Road to Ndawo, recounts a series of stories from the current dream that we call real life and includes the culmination of his inner search along with the karmic tale of his love of a woman. The Road to Ndawo, at times, touches subtly upon his past life memories as they are told within the first three books. His fifth book, Henne's List, is pure fiction that explores in-depth, Mac's life experiences and musings on the mysteries of existence, quantum physics and parallel universes - in a rambling tale that crosses continents and time where characters jump out from the pages of his other books. Mac currently resides in Portugal with his Argentinian partner of five years, Claudia Escobar, a textile artist, and is beginning work on his next book, 'The Secrets of Dona Eiliva', inspired by the story of Claudia's grandmother, a rural town doctor and healer and ardent Peronist who married five times.

Book preview

Prologue

Gina

Floripa, as the locals call the Southern Brazilian city of Florianopolis, is an exotic contrast to the desolate beauty of Patagonia where Gina was raised. It is an island city with forested hills and white sand beaches, and Gina had moved there some seven or eight years ago after the birth of her daughter.

The day Gina met Marcus she was pushing forty but to look at her you would never know it - she still looked great, knew it well and so too the men around her, but Gina was in no hurry, or so she thought,

My perfect man can wait she had thought, and to be honest, nine months out of her marriage, she was enjoying the freedom. That was until the day he appeared in front of her counter holding a box of free-range eggs, this is my man, I can feel it and I have known it in some strange way for a very long time, she decided as her eyes trailed the stranger out of the shop. And Gina didn’t eat eggs. She was a vegan.

That same night, Gina dreamed, and that’s when things really started to change.

She lost an entire day and night within her dream. A dream that didn’t feel so much like a dream at the time but more like a lived experience that began in the twilight of sleep and ended in the twilight of waking.

She even missed work and that was, well, shocking for her and didn’t know whether to be more upset about that fact or about what she had done during her unexpected sojourn into some alternate reality.

You see, Gina was of a spiritual bent and had even spent two years in an ashram in Porto Alegre, had taught Yoga part time and believed firmly in being good and kind and believed in the evolution of the soul, so when she had found herself walking through a bleak and very strange city, entering a house by slipping through a window left ajar and cutting a woman’s throat from ear to ear before scalping her she became deeply troubled. And had even been somewhat unsurprised to see her reflection in the mirror while tying the scalp to her side - the reflection of a native Indian woman dressed in braided buckskins. The first thought that had come to her mind was how similarly she and her dream Indian woman wore their hair when going to work, and how eerily similar they looked – she saw her own self. It is funny how those little details can stand out so vividly in the midst of mayhem. Many accounts of soldiers in battle describe such seemingly insignificant details.

Gina tried hard to be good and by and large she was, but she knew that she could be unforgiving if someone crossed her badly, very unforgiving. That troubled her sometimes too, at other times it didn’t, and then she was Kali, cutting off the heads of demons who deserved nothing more for their evil intentions. But those were mental and calculated vengeances, not bloody ones such as she had committed in that strange and bleak city – and committed without a hint of mercy or regret.

But was it a dream? It had been all too real? Even to the point where she could swear that she felt the cold of the metal door handle that she opened, a part of her not knowing how it worked - the Indian part no doubt - and yet she, Gina, knew how to open it as if she was inside the head of the Indian squaw. And then there was the man driving the car. There had been another journey in a car too with two men, but that memory had faded into a blur.

The ride that retained its perfect clarity was the drive away from that grey place with that strange thin man driving. Neither had spoken a word, but both of them had an understanding of sorts, a common knowing of what was taking place.

What exactly was it though? Gina desperately tried to figure out what it had all meant, but it was like one of those things you knew you knew and that lurked in the memory somewhere but was inaccessible to any effort of recollection.

She felt like she was trapped inside an impossible puzzle, recalling too, her telling her name to the big Indian police officer who had been in the car with the thin man the first time - that had been before she cut the woman’s throat and yes, she remembered that too, every bloody detail.

The day she turned up at work, Marcus came in half an hour after opening just like he always did on the days he showed up, but this time, instead of sitting down in the café at the front of the shop, he came inside and throwing a warm smile in Gina’s direction, picked up a basket and filled it with organic vegetables and a half kilo of buffalo mozzarella from the fridge. Gina felt excited as he approached the counter, realizing that she was already smiling.

Hi, he said as he offered her his hand, completely ignoring the busty, blonde shop owner standing at Gina’s side. His smile melted her.

Are you German? she asked, not quite knowing whether that was what she wanted him to be or not.

Tasmanian, he answered laughingly.

And you?

Patagonian, she replied with a twinkling eye.

Then we are children from the ends of the earth, he said with a somewhat lazy grin.

They exchanged phone numbers and met up at the gas station on the Friday night. Stepping into his car, Gina suddenly realized she had no idea at all about this man and succumbed to a sudden bout of nervousness that was not her normal self, but thankfully he broke the ice,

What would you like to do?

I don’t know, and you?

"Ok, you choose then, Odin or Shiva?

Gina broke into a smile,

Shiva, I know, but who is Odin?

Odin, the King of the Nordic Gods to whose hall his slain warriors come to drink and feast.

Normally Shiva, but tonight I think I choose Odin, she answered with a flick of a strand of her heavy shock of raven hair.

Ah, Odin, alright - you know ‘Books and Beers’ in the Centrino de Lagoa? I have a story to tell you.

Chapter 1

The Crime

James Charles was not by any standards, a nice man - knew what a lot of people thought about him and really didn’t care. Fear and respect were all he sought, and in his position as Chief legal counsel for the giant oil and gas company, Norvehc, he commanded plenty of it.

James had once declared to the indigenous peoples of Ecuador, where Norvehc had laid waste to thousands of hectares of pristine tropical forest that he would bury their claims for compensation under an endless barrage of counter-litigation and money.

We will fight them until hell freezes over and then skate out on the ice, he had proclaimed, and had been true to his word.

James had even hired William Harmes as the head of the corporation’s legal department, the former General Counsel at the Pentagon under Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Harmes was the guy who had signed off on the infamous ‘Torture Memo’, the one that had given the go-ahead for the waterboarding of terror suspects in Kazakhstan.

James Charles would stop at nothing. There were only two kinds of people in his world - winners and losers - and he wasn’t ever going to fall into the latter category.

James paused in front of the mirror to adjust his tie, carefully selected to match every piece of his expensively attired outfit from the best fashion houses of San Francisco, the center piece of which was his Brioni suit. Like many successful black men, James liked to wear his success for the world to see, except for him it didn’t stop at the style alone. He wore his six-thousand-dollar suit in the same way he wore his one hundred and ninety centimeter, one hundred and ten kilo frame – as a form of armored intimidation to those who had to confront him on the other side of the conference table.

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He met up with Candice outside the washroom, and typically, Candice didn’t have a hair out of place atop her hourglass figure cut with a cherry red suit that both exuded femininity and conservatism. In dressing for the part, Candice had learned that if you aimed to have executive presence and garner immediate credibility and respect, you need to have a style so impressive that you own the room when you enter it. A Daddy suit won't do it and nor will a conservative suit in pastel blue or pink either and pastels are downright wimpy. Everything about your image from head to toe must exude success and power. Your hair, makeup and accessories must look extraordinary. Candice had lipstick to match but her briefcase was conservative befitting the document laden baggage of a successful legal queen. But it was ordered, meticulously arranging her briefcase each morning with the same precision that she arranged her make-up and took almost as much time to do so. She could produce the required document in a split second, plucking the paper from her case in a way that the manicured nails never felt the hard edge of the leather compartments, the same with her tablet. Information was only ever a couple of key taps away.

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Candice had graduated in law from Yale after having refused to speak to her father until he had agreed to pay for her tuition there rather than study at Berkeley near to home - not that Berkeley was a bad school, in fact it was one of the top law schools in the country but Yale, well Yale just had a better ring to it within the confines of Candice’s ambitious and calculating mind. And Candice had not only studied law, corporate and international law in particular, but she had studied successful women lawyers, had studied successful women politicians and successful women in general.

When she had read about how Hillary Clinton as a young defense attorney had laughed when recounting how she had managed to win a case for a clearly guilty rapist - of a twelve-year-old girl no less - the footnotes Candice made were not judgmental in the way a normal person may have been shocked by Hillary’s sociopathic gloating, but judgmental of the way Hillary had been sloppy and less than calculating in allowing her conversation to be recorded.

Candice herself understood that she, likewise couldn’t empathize but she didn’t see it as a failing but rather, a strength. But Candice knew that the world expected empathy, so she studied how to show empathy when required, the same way she studied law, professional attire and pistol shooting. Pistol shooting was her outlet, the one indulgence she allowed herself beyond the absolutely essential socializing required to maintain her business connections and her executive lover.

Candice had woken at five, her normal waking hour, had ritually showered, completed her abbreviated set of yoga exercises and eaten healthily before perfecting her face and briefcase. The point where she turned on her computer was when the first alert had flashed up on the screen and her previously planned day of professional achievement had been abruptly disturbed.

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All set Candice?

It was the gruff voice of James Charles, but she knew he was behind her before he spoke. His perfume was unmistakable and almost as overpowering as the man himself.

We have a problem, she answered him with barely a turn of the head, waiting for him to draw alongside of her.

Solving problems, Candice, is what they hired me for - shoot.

You’re not going to like it.

Try me, he answered, actually, things have been a bit dull lately - give me some heads to bang together, a bit of ass to kick and it will brighten my day.

Candice raised her eyebrows, but subtly, as if doing it for her own inner alleviation. She didn’t like James all that much, but it wasn’t something she really dwelled on at all, and she didn’t have to like him so long as he was happy with the work she did. She knew why she had been hired by him and it wasn’t only because of her looks, nor because of her impressive credentials, but because she was his antithesis of style, cold and calculating, bringing a cool head, a charming and reassuring presence in the midst of his table thumping, booming voiced intimidation. She was like Ann in the palm of the giant Gorilla, except she never screamed, but just gave barely perceptible icy stares or answered James in stony silence while she flicked another document from her case to push it deftly across the conference table in the direction of her intended victim, a kind of conference table assassination by long, cherry red fingernail. Candice was also the detail, the fine print with a memory like a search engine. James was the big picture man who could sum up a battle plan and a response in a matter of minutes, or at the most, after a few hours of phone calls and text messages.

Wikileaks have accessed the full text of the document - they have it all and it is also being hard copy pasted in Berlin at the Brandenburg gate as we speak.

James wanted to fuck her in that moment. Somehow, she did that to him the more tense she got, the more set her sculpted waspish jaw became. He was sure she would like it if she gave him the chance, but he himself felt slightly intimidated by her and it grated with him that he felt like that.

As a black man he had rolled over the top of so many people of different color during his professional life - from Harvard trained corporate executives hailing from the best New York and Boston families to predatory Hong Kong legal teams and had goaded them all into submission with a combination of threatening personal presence and legal blitzkrieg. James had arrived at the point where he felt pretty much invincible. Even the long running legal battles in Ecuador had been a cakewalk for him, dealing as he had to with the shifting sands of South American politics and under the table payments and opposed to a team of self-righteous legal jerks who worked incessantly for indigenous rights and compensation.

Candice, however, irritatingly made him feel like the black boy from the wrong side of the tracks and made him feel like that even though he never exactly came from the wrong side of the tracks. His father had been an accomplished lawyer and conservative card-carrying Republican who had raised James in a mostly white middle-class neighborhood.

He kept walking without answering her as they swept into the foyer of one of the Hotel Brussel’s meeting rooms, grabbing a black coffee on his way through and pausing momentarily at the window to take in the view of the Boulevard de Waterloo and its fine fashion houses.

Another trouble-shooting job for him in Europe.

Fuck the Europeans and their nit-picking fucking correctness, he thought to himself.

Some years ago, he had helped orchestrate the coup in the Ukraine. That hadn’t posed too high a degree of difficulty. He had thrown Norvehc’s money around unsparingly enough and in tandem with the political machinations of Hillary Clinton’s State Department had managed to buy a loose coalition of free-market neo cons and Nazi’s coupled with naive pro-democracy student protestors to successfully topple the elected government sympathetic to Putin’s Russia. Norvehc had had their gas fracking licenses in place with the new regime within weeks of its installation.

Overall, though, he preferred to work with the Central and South Americans. They were changeable and had an inherent dislike of Americans born of that ridiculous mix of inferiority and pride, but money and power always talked to them so long as they were not ideological leftists still pretending to political purity. If that were the case it was usually just a matter of time and well spent money that would either put paid to their whining or, if necessary, put paid to them.

And patience? Norvehc had patience and it had money. It was now one of the largest corporations in the planet and its annual revenues were greater than the GDP of one hundred and fifty of the world’s smaller countries.

What Norvehc’s annual report does not tell its shareholders is the true cost paid for those financial returns, the lives lost, wars fought, communities destroyed, environments decimated, livelihoods ruined, and political voices silenced.

James Charles couldn’t have cared less. Progress was progress, winners were winners and losers can eat fucking beans if it pleases them, and besides, Norvehc had a whole department of spin merchants, green-washers and charitable works to deal with the mess until the mess was only perceived mess and finally, but a minor blemish overshadowed by Norvehc’s stunning global growth and achievements.

James Charle’s job was different. He was both the political and legal fixer, somewhat akin to a mafia owned security service who did the break-ins and then hired itself out for the subsequent security contract. James was in Brussels to ensure that Norvehc’s legal team, who had been working on the fine print of the rehashed trade deal with Europe, had the support of his political and legal muscle to see through a major transition of power from the State to the global corporations. Six hundred corporate lawyers employed by the world’s top twenty banks and corporations had worked thousands of hours on four different global trade deals simultaneously and crunch hour was approaching.

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The news about the Wikileaks publication was not welcome but not entirely unexpected either. Green groups and the internet media had been crowing for years about what they thought was in the fine print and they had been dead right but now the proof was out - well, it had all happened before under Obama and then later under Trump when the whiners had thought the deals were dead and buried. Different regime in the white house now, different promises to renege on and a neat rehash of essentially the same deals under different names and it was all back on the table again.

Somethings gonna have to be sacrificed, he thought to himself. He hated caving in, but he had pre-planned for this anyway.

The thing the Europeans are most precious about is their fucking food and alcohol. Now we play the Santomon card, he considered as he lingered for a few moments in front of the view to the Boulevard de Waterloo before turning on his heels and striding into the meeting room.

James had been orchestrating leaks about Santomon’s genetically modified plants for some time and more recently, leaks about the effects of their glyphosate-based weedicide on the health of the soil. He had even filtered money through to some groups opposed to Santomon. Funnily enough, as much as he despised the green groups, he really didn’t like Santomon either and didn’t trust genetically modified food any more than Vladimir Putin did. Santomon had been his planned sacrificial lamb for years now.

As he surveyed the room, he paid particular attention to the lawyers from the European commission and the parliamentary chair of the NATT working group. They looked tense and one of their legal team was pouring over some documents while rubbing absent-mindedly on the last remaining hairs of his balding head, simultaneously jabbing his pen irritatingly into a block of paper in between feverishly scribbling notes.

If this man played the game, he would have a lucrative and well-paid position with Norvehc within a year. He rose stiffly from his chair when he saw James lingering in the corner of the room and shuffled over to him.

We have a problem, he whispered.

The French or the Germans?, James asked

The French.

Food and wine?

Yes, food and wine, the lawyer answered in a way that was less in surprise and more in admiration of James.

We are going to give it to them, he answered in return.

But Santomon? the man asked with eyebrows raised.

It’s chess, Bernard - Santomon are like a fucking bishop - not exactly a pawn but a fucking bishop - we sacrifice bishops so we can corner the Queen.

You mean we can write food and wine out of the deal?

And fucking beer too - if the French get their wine, the Germans are going to want their fucking beer too.

And our fucking vodka? asked Bernard. He was Polish, half polish to be exact as his father had been French. Bernard didn’t sound threatening when he spoke like James. When he said fucking, it sounded more like he was bringing up a piece of phlegm.

And your vodka, answered James.

But certainly not fracking, I imagine - the fact that most of Western Europe has banned fracking because of its threat to water purity and farmland has a lot to do with food production, James - how do we argue around that?

James merely stared coldly at Bernard, saying as he walked off to his seat,

Bernard, you really shouldn’t say fracking - when you say fracking it sounds too much like you are saying fucking and vice versa.

Bernard got the message.

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James slept like a log most nights. That night he didn’t - he woke about one in the morning screaming, a giant Viking having just hacked his head off. He could still see the bastard hovering over him, but worse, he could see his own headless and mutilated neck gushing blood all over the brushed cotton and silk mix, white sheets of room 817 of the Hotel Brussels on the Boulevard de Waterloo. His last thought was that it might just be a really shitty dream – it wasn’t.

Chapter 2

Inspector Hubert

Inspector Delmar Hubert of the Unité de Homicide based in Brussels looked down at the decapitated body sprawled over the king size hotel bed thinking that such an ample and oversized body, well-muscled as it was, was really deserving of a king size bed - the body of a very large black man. The man’s dead cock had already shrunk and, ashamed of its owner’s gruesome end, attempting it would seem, to disappear into the man’s abdomen. But post-mortem behavior of the man’s organ was of just passing anatomical interest to the Inspector. What really intrigued him was the bed spring that had erupted from within the mattress and now hovered directly above the neck area of the corpse giving the illusion of a giant, black, jack in a box - albeit now headless.

Delmar Hubert had the room entirely to himself and he had insisted on taking all the time he needed to begin to make sense of the bizarre scene before him. The victim’s head had been cleaved with such force and by a weapon of such magnitude that it had continued straight on into the mattress - cutting clean through the sheets and the cushion layer to expose the inner springs.

Mattresses are made of many materials, both natural and synthetic. The innerspring, helical, and box-spring components are made from wire - the box-spring wire usually of a heavier gauge than that used in the innerspring. The insulator consists of semi-rigid netting or wire mesh, and the cushioning layers can comprise a number of different materials including natural fiber, polyurethane foam, and polyester. The flanges are made of fabric, and the hogs rings of metal. Top, bottom, and side panels consist of a durable fabric cover quilted over a backing of foam or fiber, and the binding.

The axe had cut through the lot after passing through a very large neck, the Inspector noted on his I-pad, his artistic fingers moving fluidly over the screen as he did so. He then turned about, and raised his beloved I-pad to begin snapping photos of the scene, right down to close-ups of the man’s shriveling penis.

He took out his tape measure from the right-hand side pocket of his dark green suit jacket, straightening up as he did so, brushed his elongated and rather pointy fingers through his dark blown dry hair, fiddled momentarily with his silver ear stud and then leant over the decapitated head, resting his knee on the edge of the bed in order to measure the cut in the mattress.

Eighteen inches - a cutting edge size consistent with the largest known axe of the Viking era, an edge frighteningly sharp too, he thought to himself while observing the neatness of the cut through the layers of sheet, foam and mesh insulator where the blade had violently dislodged the surprised inner spring. now wobbling slightly from the movement of the inspector’s knee as it departed the side of the bed with the spring mimicking a kind of Indian nod as if to agree with Delmar’s thoughts.

The fact that he had already googled everything he needed to know about Vikings and Viking weaponry enroute to the Hotel was predicated on the information the police had already received from the staff on the night desk - a huge Viking carrying a battle axe had strolled through the doors and headed to the stairwell at precisely two am.

Why no-one stopped the huge Viking from proceeding past the check-in desk, the concierge and whoever else was awake and present in the hotel’s foyer at two am was also no real mystery - it happened to be Halloween. Twenty years ago, if that particular occurrence happened in the middle of the night at two am it most probably would have caused a few questions but with the global Americanization of culture that had taken place since then, it engendered but a few raised eyebrows and chuckles and a polite, good evening, sir.

When the Viking had made his way out through the foyer some fifteen minutes later and spattered from head to toe in what looked like blood but may just as well have been ketchup, the eyebrows only elevated marginally higher.

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Candice, of course had raised the alarm when the normally obsessively cell-phone aware James Charles had not picked up at their pre-arranged call check at seven am. Twenty minutes later an irritated staff member had begrudgingly unlocked the door to room 817 with a nervous Candice hovering at his back.

That in itself is the biggest mystery, thought Delmar, how did the Viking get in without smashing the door with his axe?

The young student working the 1.00am to 9.00am shift had expected to find the large impeccably dressed black man, a man almost as noticeable in his appearance as the Viking, in bed with a local prostitute. The fact that he hadn’t and instead had been the first to witness the gory scene in front of him had weirdly led to his first embarrassed thought being, I really shouldn’t have been so racially presumptuous.

Delmar had already spoken briefly to the shaken student, had been filled in with what details had already surfaced by the attending Inspector first on the scene, but what he had learned had been disappointing. The student had not been very observant. He had been one of those who had seen the Viking pass through the foyer but had not noticed the color of his eyes, nor if the Viking had rough and calloused hands, information that would have been useful to Delmar. No-one had even been close-enough to the Viking to ascertain his smell. He spent another two hours taking measurements, snapping photos on his I-pad and for half an hour meditated on the side of the bed next to the corpse.

Inspector Delmar Hubert was not often called in to lead an investigation - forensics being his specialty – and more often he provided the forensic analysis for an investigation only but any case that hinted of the super-natural or any case that had the aroma of ritualistic killing, it was Delmar they turned to. He was the one who had provided the breakthrough in the investigations into the ring of high-end child sex abusers a few years back and he had done it through his intimate knowledge of the occult.

You see, Delmar was a nerd, and on the autistic spectrum but he was also a type of savant with a mind-boggling knowledge of the occult, of eastern mysticism and pagan rites. What he began to see in this case excited him.

Back in his office at one in the afternoon he set about tweeting and googling furiously and took special note of certain search results. The first thing that Delmar did with any investigation was turn to Einstein. If nothing else, turning to Einstein was inspiration for him to see beyond the normal view of things. Albert Einstein was often asked to explain the general theory of relativity.

Put your hand on a hot stove for a minute, and it seems like an hour,

he once declared, sit with a pretty girl for an hour, and it seems like a minute - that’s relativity!

It wasn’t long before Delmar had uncovered numerous tweets about sightings of a blood-spattered Viking warrior with a huge axe in hand striding at a bewildering pace through the streets of Brussels in the early hours of the morning. Shortly he found a tweet where someone had mentioned how bad the Viking smelled - from a woman of course. The tweets, Instagram and Facebook posts were scarce but there were enough people who had seen the giant Viking and reacted on social media to understand that after beheading the black man he was taking an almost compass like route north.

To the sea I would assume, considered Delmar, Vikings always go back to their ships.

Finally, he found the post he was looking for. It never ceased to amaze him how so many teenagers had no security settings on their Facebook pages, but there it was on the timeline of a Marie De Greyte from Temse, a town just twenty-five kilometers along the Scheldt River from Antwerp.

The post was of a group of three teenagers, a young man and two girls, with cell phones raised in one hand and their free arms around a giant Viking standing in front of a Norse langrskip moored beneath a modern bridge. Delmar could make out the form of a second bridge in the background, of older steel frame lattice design, alongside the modern bridge, and immediately recognized it as the dual bridges on the N16 just south of Temse.

The photo had a caption that read,

Gave this Viking a lift, haha, he drank the rest of our beer and got hot with me in the back seat and he stank of fish - yuk!! spoke some weird dialect, but we got to understand a few words even though we were all soooo freaking out of it - haha - but he was soooo freaking big - haha

Further searches revealed no sightings of a Viking ship navigating the Scheldt down-river and passing through the city of Antwerp to the sea. He hadn’t really expected it somehow. Delmar wrote down the following words on his I-pad.

Viking possibly not of this time - sole intention to kill James Charles, Chief Legal Officer and Senior Vice President of Norvehc. Chances of arresting the right culprit in the immediate future, next to zero, in the past, by degrees more probable.

Delmar’s phones had been running hot. He had turned off the volume of his smart phone but when he opened his departmental in-box, he found the screen had been inundated with urgent messages. The CIA, NATO and Interpol were all over the case already and demanding he get back to them, and no doubt they had been given access to the crime scene over and above Delmar’s wishes. It didn’t matter. He knew what he had to look for, so he began first by scanning the major news networks, most of whom fed off the same sources and fed into the same system of global information - misinformation he called it.

CNN, the BBC, MSNBC and most other European and American news channels had already condemned the beheading as an execution with the prints of ISIS all over it.

Politicians were shortly interviewed thundering about the appalling lack of security for such a high-level meeting, calling for retaliations and beating their chests in feigned sorrow about how the loss of individual liberties were sometimes the price of freedom in the face of terrorism and pandemics.

Makes a lot of sense, Delmar thought to himself somewhat sarcastically.

Delmar simply noted:

Major news networks, nothing unexpected - wrong track as usual.

Delmar turned to the underground news services and activist sites on the net. This proved much more interesting. Within a short space of time, he had compiled a dossier of every crime that Norvehc had committed throughout its global operations as the second largest company in the world and in almost every case, the name of James Charles came up. Delmar began to realize that the number of people who would rejoice in James Charles’ death may run into the thousands.

There wouldn’t be a single kind, peace loving environmental or indigenous rights activist who wouldn’t quietly be righteously approving of this man’s death, he wrote, but who, out of all of these groups, would have the power to conjure up a 9th century Viking warrior to carry out such an act?

You see, Delmar’s mind was already working in the realms of the fantastic and he had dismissed by the odds of ten to one the possibility that this case was going to find a logical conclusion within the worldly accepted scale of limitations.

Delmar had never been good at mathematics in school but his IQ tests had been extraordinary. His mind didn’t work with formulas simply because it had other pathways to mathematical answers that circumvented the need for formulas. His mind worked the same way as a computer does by rapid elimination of all impossibilities until there was only the possible left.

The answer to his question kept coming back to the Ecuadorean Indians against whom Norvehc had been fighting ongoing legal battles for the past two decades. They were angry, and they knew exactly who their enemy was. They also had Shamans amongst them who could, amongst other abilities, astral travel, communicate with the spirits and the forces of nature, and even it was claimed, shape shift into other people or animals.

He had read a novel recently where an old Amazon Indian shaman had committed a spate of murders in Florida while shape shifting into the form of a giant jaguar.

He sought out novels like that for both his personal entertainment and his professional education. He left no possibilities to spare, but in that particular novel, it had annoyed him that the old shaman of the story had managed to conjure an animal that didn’t have a physical presence in the immediate locality. The shape shifters he had encountered needed the live presence of an animal or other human to temporarily inhabit. Delmar became easily irritated with gaping holes in plots.

But what was the possibility of an Amazonian shaman having inhabited a Viking warrior who had walked onto an ancient langreskip at 6.37 am on the Scheldt River and had apparently vanished into thin air along with the ship?

Delmar ran the possibilities through his radically open mind and quickly noted on his I-pad,

Extremely low

Delmar decided to take another tack to narrow the possibilities. The next list of searches he confined to current and impending operations of Norvehc around the globe that were causing alarm amongst environmentalists and indigenous groups. It could be said that Delmar was surprised to find that it wasn’t only those groups but also farmers in America, Australia and Brazil who were rebelling against Norvehc’s massive gas fracking operations. But Delmar wasn’t surprised at all. His mind had already calculated the possibility of farmers joining the other two groups long ago and had seen farmers and environmentalists aligned with each other in France just last year. Norvehc’s operations in Brazil piqued his interest - Brazil had strong associations with magic and shamanic activity and James Charles had been there just two months ago, meeting with politicians from PMDB, one of Brazil’s most influential political parties. A quick search into his own memory reminded him that the PMDB had, some years back, wrested power from the Socialist president with whom they had been allied. It also revealed to him that the PMDB were horrendously corrupt, even by Brazil’s standards and the majority of the original cabinet were already in jail or awaiting trial or somehow working for the current neo fascist President in positions of newly acquired power.

James Charles, he had ascertained by now, was Norvehc’s chief fixer so his mind immediately began to compute possibilities of Norvehc’s chief legal man to be the organizer of a major graft operation - possibilities he calculated to being about 10 to 1 on, in racing parlance. This is how Delmar worked.

What he stored on his I-pad were mostly reminders and pointers. The vast store of knowledge in his head could be compartmentalized in a kind of state of suspended animation while other parts of his brain worked out related solutions that could be computed separately until the various stores of computed knowledge could be brought back together to either find an answer or further narrow the possibilities.

The information on Brazilian corruption and politics and the seemingly limitless assaults by Norvehc on aquifers around the world was set aside for now as Delmar’s mind altered course.

Calamities always happened in threes, whether they were global events or merely a run of bad luck by an individual person of little consequence. Only that Delmar never considered any small thing or little-known person of no consequence. He was an avid book reader but when Delmar went on to amazon.com he avoided the best sellers, avoided the heavily promoted books, the popular readers choices and so on. He always looked for the obscure reading material of potential consequence and he found what he wanted by typing in combinations of key words such as physics, re-incarnation, cunt, or gods, elemental, sociopath just to see if there was a chapter of some obscure book that included all words with some regularity. His methodology produced both remarkable and appalling results.

Delmar meditated for the next fifteen minutes, emptied his mind more or less until there was no definitive train of thought and then intuitively typed in parallel, portal and prophecy.

The three words immediately filled his search screen with both news from the latest discoveries from the Large Hadron Collider and with countless conspiracy theories surrounding it.

The Large Hadron Collider was going to unlock the secrets of the universe, perhaps re-create dark matter and simulate the moments after the big bang - except the Big Bang theory was now under question.

The particle accelerator had already found the Higgs boson, the God Particle, which is thought to give